---------------------------<snip>---------------------
Your characteristic nose-penetrating inadequately documented stand-alone
"No"s are an affront to the purposes of the list and do not constitute a
"civilized discussion". Rather they cause exhaustion and are very
misleading for those readers who may wish to learn something.
As for being offensive, please refer to your recent extensive post on my
last attempt to counter your amazing ability to misunderstand.
I might also point out that the "future bugs" to which you refer are
presumably caused by a new programmer having come along and
misunderstood what has been coded already. It was always the intention
behind my comments to try to find a way to minimize that possibility. I
believe Alan had exactly the same intent and I'm sure his "best
practice" was intended to be an Aunt Sally rather than an ex cathedra.
-----------------------------<unsnip>------------------------
What started as an interesting discussion seems to have devolved into a
personnal vendetta, accomplishing nothing except wasting bandwidth.
Having been an Assembler programmer for 35 years, I'm going to stick my
oar in, with the (perhaps forlorn) hope of getting this back to a
PROFESSIONAL discussion.
When I first started programming in Assembler, I was taught to always
use numeric lengths in SS instructions, even when refering to data whose
length was self -defining. Then I started seeing the code that others
were "cranking out" and started to discover some of the nuances of
style. Some of these were good and some not so good; some elements
contributed greatly to readability and understanding, others led me to
considerable confusion. But each of us has techniques and style that we
believe are very good, and we've all seen some examples of incredibly
poor code as well. I'm not sure that any one of us is qualified to be
the arbiter of "Best Practice"; the elements of style are too many and
varied.
IMHO, the only criterion should be whether someone who's never seen the
code before can pick up a listing and understand what it's doing well
enough to maintain or debug it.
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